from 'Horse with Hat' (Victoria University Press, 2014) Reprinted here with the kind permission of the poet.Editor: Janis Freegard.

This is a poem that really stayed with me, not just because of the drowning of the dying lamb, but because of the expertly sketched relationship between father and daughter. Then there is the surprising language: a creek that dimples and rumples, the "pudgy mud". It stands alone perfectly, but is also part of the bigger family story that Marty tells in her excellent Horse with Hat.

Marty says: 'This is an exercise poem from the distance learning IWP programme I
did with marvellous Iowa tutor Margaret Ross. The idea was to try to
burrow down into memory by free writing - wide-ranging, jumbled, and
fragmentary- to try and snag some memories. We were looking at poems by
Lynn Hejinian by way of example. I suppose the rubbish tip of your
brain throws up high voltage points in memory, and it started straight
off with the little flowers floating in the creek.

I’m pleased
about the image of my shadow as my father, because it hooks into part
of a larger exploration of why humans persist in believing in
paternalistic systems of faith (and what cultural shift is doing to that
belief). I also just really like the visual idea.'

On Marty's website, you can scroll down to a most interesting audio recording of Agnus Dei, in collaboration with Maude Morris, an analysis of the poem by one of Marty's students and footage of Marty riding a gallop at Newmarket.

Horse with Hat (Victoria University Press) isMarty Smith's debut collection. It recently won the
NZSA Best First Book for Poetry award at the 2014 New Zealand Post Book
Awards and is a finalist for the main Poetry award. The manuscript for Horse with Hat was also short-listed for the 2011 Kathleen Grattan Award. Agnus Dei was a place-getter in the 2014 Joy Harjo Poetry Prize (US), was short-listed for the Bridport Prize and has featured on a Phantom Billstickers poster. Marty describes the book as a conversation with her father, who loved books and ideas but found it hard to breach his habitual silence.

Horse with Hat
also features a series of marvellous collages by Brendan O'Brien, made from engravings in a bible similar to the
Smith Family Bible. The coloured images are from Garth Smith's cigarette
card collection. As in the poems, figures in the collages appear,
disappear, then make another entrance in a different configuration.

Marty Smith describes herself as a teacher who still keeps a secret
longing to do one more round of a racecourse on a quiet horse. She
worked as a track-work rider in New Zealand and in Newmarket, England,
and her next project is an ethnography of the racing world.

Her poems have been widely published, including in Best New Zealand Poems 2009 and 2011, and the anthology Best of Best New Zealand Poems.

This week's editor is Janis Freegard, author of The Continuing Adventures of Alice Spider (Anomalous Press) and Kingdom Animalia: the Escapades of Linnaeus (Auckland University Press).

A fantastic poem with imagery that sits in your head long after reading. As you say, Janis, Marty does some fabulous things with language, and the story itself has a raw, fresh quality like just-sawn wood -- and there's something about being right at the edge of feeling: the horror of the lamb in the water, and beside it in its own pool the watching of the father, now an absence/shadow...Thanks so much, Janis and Marty.

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